1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to a face detection system, and, more particularly, to a face detection system for a vehicle, which can improve detection performance while reducing computational load required for the determination of whether a driver of the vehicle is inattentive.
2. Related Art
Generally, a vehicle is provided with a face detection system, which has been used as an element for determining whether a driver dozes off while driving or whether the driver intends to change a lane.
A conventional face detection system includes an image camera for capturing a face, and a control unit for determining whether a driver is inattentive in looking ahead by analyzing the face captured by the image camera.
When the face is captured by the image camera and a captured facial image is input to the control unit, the control unit detects a facial region by binarizing the input image, and thus detects an edge shape, such as a facial contour, from the facial region. Thereafter, the control unit detects detailed elements of the face, such as the eyes, nose, mouth, etc., from an edge-shaped image, and calculates an angle of orientation of the face, thus determining whether the driver is inattentive in looking ahead.
However, in order to detect the eyes, nose, mouth, etc., precise detection must be performed. The conventional system is inevitably sensitive to variation in various external optical environments. As a result, there is a problem in that the performance of the detection of respective elements is deteriorated, thus resulting in a deterioration of the performance of the determination of whether the driver is inattentive in looking ahead.
Further, the conventional face detection system calculates an orientation angle of a face through the detection of a facial region, the extraction of an edge-shaped image, and the detection of respective elements, thus determining whether the driver is attentive in looking ahead. Accordingly, there is a problem in that computational load required for such a process greatly increases, so that it is difficult to implement the face detection system in an embedded system in real time. To overcome the problem, a high quality clock and high priced Central Processing Unit (CPU) is required, which increases costs required for the face detection.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the invention and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.